The Black Horror on the Rhine, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust

“Dedicated to those without memorial or monument.”

That is the epigraph to John A. Williams’ Clifford’s Blues (1999), a novel that illuminates the the connections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust and illuminates the Nazis treatment of Blacks during their reign of terror. Clifford Pepperidge, a Black, gay musician from New Orleans who traveled to Europe to escape Jim Crow and play music narrates Clifford’s Blues. The novel is his diary, a diary he kept from his incarceration in Dachau in May 1933 till his escape in April 1945. It chronicles his 12 years spent in the Nazi camp, and as he writes in one of his final entries before escaping and hear about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death, “Roosevelt was a president I never even knew much about.”

Clifford’s Blues is a memorial or monument to the Black victims on Nazi Germany’s violence and oppression. While we follow Clifford exclusively, getting bits and pieces of historical events outside of the walls of Dachau, we see the ways that the Nazis treat him and other Black individuals within the walls of the camp. While Clifford has a job working in the house of Dieter Lange, an SS officer, he still experiences violence and persecution. Dieter and his wife, along with other Nazi officials, treat him paternalistically, petting his head and treating him as if he is invisible…